Incorruptible in Performance

Over the weekend, I attended a performance of Incorruptible that was put on by the Saginaw Valley State University theater department. The show was directed by David Rzeszutek, a theater professor who managed to impress me with how well the play was performed. The play was very enjoyable and I really liked watching the play after enjoying reading the script so much. Most of the characters were exactly how I pictured them, but Professor Rzeszutek added some things that enhanced the play and others that I felt took away from it.

Allow me to begin with the character of Jack. David Milka played the character exactly how I imagined him to be. He seemed to be very charismatic and witty, and you never knew what to expect from him next. Milka also did an excellent job of milking the humor out of the show with his very well timed comedic side comments. I loved how he played a character that played to the audience. Next is Charles. I loved how Rusty Myers played the role of a suffering priest in conflict. He was very humorous throughout the play but also very serious when the need arose. Olf was another character that I thoroughly enjoyed. He truly was a loveable oaf and David Ryan brought that to light in the funniest way possible. Olf starred in one of my favorite parts when he clothes lined Jack as the latter tried to escape. The peasant woman played by Cassidy Morey was surprisingly humorous. Although she was a smaller character without much dialogue, the humor was really emphasized with some of the “vulgar” gestures that she used that you wouldn’t expect from a woman of her age.

Agatha, Charles’s sister, was played by Mykaela Hopps. Vocally, the character was perfect. She was extremely loud and very frightening. However, the actress was pretty small and after watching Charles shake in fear, I had expected her to be some huge woman with monster strength. This is only a small complaint that I can’t really validate because I enjoyed her performance. On the other hand, the character that I couldn’t stand was Felix. He was played by Cameron Thorp. I had expected Felix to be a very outgoing and robust character after reading the script. After all, he is supposed to have been a great lover of women. However, Cameron played the character so timid and un-influential that I wondered how he managed to help restore faith to the church at all. Besides the character of Felix, the only other complaint about the performance I had was that the lines of the play frequently ran together. At these moments, I had a hard time figuring out whom was talking, much less what they were saying.

 Overall, the show was very good. It had great humor and an excellent cast. I would definitely recommend seeing the show if you have the opportunity.   

The Good Person of Szechwan

In his play The Good Person of Szechwan, Brecht uses the alienation effect to break the illusion of the play. He does this by having the characters address the audience and through the songs that the characters sing. I find myself conflicted about Brecht using these devices. On the one hand, I really enjoy when a character talks to the audience. On the other, I do not really like the songs that interrupt the play.

As I said before, I really enjoy when a character talks to the audience. However, my enjoyment of this device is not limited to this play. I enjoy pretty much anything that breaks the fourth wall in order to entertain the audience. It could be a character addressing the audience like in The Good Person of Szechwan or it could be in a comic where the character uses the boundaries of the comic panels to perform some gag. It could also be a TV show like Family Guy where the characters occasionally acknowledge that they are in a TV show and make fun of themselves for it. In The Good Person of Szechwan, I enjoyed the breaking of the fourth wall for two reasons. It was sometimes funny, such as when Wang asks the audience if the gods discovered the false bottom in his water jug, and it was sometimes expositional and gave me a clearer view of what was going on.

I disliked the music portion of the alienation effect because it was more confusing than entertaining. It had hidden meanings in each verse that I had to re-read in order to understand. I would not have caught on to some of these if the play was performed and I only heard them once. I also didn’t like them because they were in prose form instead of rhyming. The play has an Asian setting and characters, so it would make sense that they use the Asian form of poetry which is generally prose. However, the lack of rhyme just mad the songs feel like they interrupted the play instead of helping it along like breaking the fourth wall did.

Incorruptable

The play Incorruptible by Michael Hollinger lives up to its subtitle. It is indeed a dark comedy about the dark ages. However, in addition to being incredibly funny and having a dark sense of irony, the play also raises some religious and moral questions. The biggest theological question that stood out to me was, "How much of our lives do we control and how much do we leave to fate?" We could spend our lives living as the monks did at the beginning of the play: relying on a higher power to resolve our needs. Or we could take on Jack's point of view and assume that we make our own fortune in this world. A view that the monks seem  adopt when Martin says, "Tell me why it's not that simple." The monks decide, much like most of us do today, that trusting in God's miracles means trusting themselves to make those miracles happen. Reading this play certainly did make me stop and think about how much of my life I actually fight for and what parts of it I simply let faith handle. Incorruptible had a very funny way of bringing these deep thoughts about.

As I said before, Incorruptible has a very dark sense of humor and a sense of irony to match. One of the aspects about this play that I enjoyed was not only the plot but the characters themselves. The play features four monks who are supposed to be the most religious figures of their time. However, they have no faith. They do not truly trust in God. Ironically, the two characters who seem to be the least religious are the one with the most faith. Felix is considered to be somewhat of a womanizer by the other monks, but he is the one who truly believes that their saint is merely waiting for a show of faith to perform miracles. Jack is the man who gave them the idea and helped them begin their grave robbing venture. He is a faithless man who believes that the church is filled with crooks yet, after living life as a monk, he is the one who ultimately has the most faith and restores the saint to her altar and is rewarded with a miracle. I really enjoyed the irony in the reversal of roles that you get to see from when the play begins to when it ends.